System and method for smoothing hierarchical data using isotonic regression

ABSTRACT

An improved system and method is provided for detecting a web page template. A web page template detector may be provided for performing page-level template detection on a web page. In general, the web page template classifier may be trained using automatically generated training data, and then the web page template classifier may be applied to web pages to identify web page templates. A web page template may be detected by classifying segments of a web page as template structures, by assigning classification scores to the segments of the web page classified as template structures, and then by smoothing the classification scores assigned to the segments of the web page. Generalized isotonic regression may be applied for smoothing scores associated with the nodes of a hierarchy by minimizing an optimization function using dynamic programming.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

The present invention is related to the following United States patentapplication, filed concurrently herewith and incorporated herein in itsentirety:

“System and Method for Detecting a Web Page Template,” Ser. No.11/800,236.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The invention relates generally to computer systems, and moreparticularly to an improved system and method for detecting a web pagetemplate.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The increased use of content-management systems to generate web pageshas significantly enriched the browsing experience of end users. Themultitude of site navigation links, sidebars, copyright notices, andtimestamps provide easy-to-access and often useful information to theusers. From an objective standpoint, however, these “template”structures pollute the content by digressing from the main topic ofdiscourse of the web page. Modern search engines may only requirecontent of web pages without such template structures for indexing,analysis and ranking of web pages for user search queries. Furthermore,template structures can cripple the performance of many modules ofsearch engines, including the index function, ranking function,summarization function, duplicate detection function, etc. Withtemplated content currently constituting more than half of all HTML onthe web and growing steadily (see for example, Z. Bar-Yossef and S.Rajagopalan, Template Detection via Data Mining and its Applications, InProc. 11th WWW, pages 580-591, 2002; and D. Gibson, K. Punera, and A.Tomkins, The Volume and Evolution of Web Page Templates, In Proc. 14thWWW (Special Interest Tracks and Posters), pages 830-839), it isimperative that search engines develop scalable tools and techniques toreliably detect templates on a web page.

Existing methods for template detection operate on a per web site basisby analyzing several web pages from the site and identifying contentand/or structure that repeats across many pages. The problem of templatedetection and removal was first studied by Bar-Yossef and Rajagopalan(see Z. Bar-Yossef and S. Rajagopalan, Template Detection via DataMining and its Applications, In Proc. 11th WWW, pages 580-591, 2002),who proposed performing site-level template detection based onsegmentation of the DOM tree, followed by the selection of certainsegments as candidate templates depending on their content. Yi et al.(see L. Yi, B. Liu, and X. Li, Eliminating Noisy Information in WebPages for Data Mining. In Proc. 9th KDD, pages 296-305, 2003) and Yi andLiu (see L. Yi and B. Liu, Web Page Cleaning for Web Mining throughFeature Weighting, In Proc. 18th IJCAI, pages 43-50, 2003) used a datastructure called the style tree to take into account the metadata foreach node, instead of its content. Vieira et al. (see K. Vieira, A.Silva, N. Pinto, E. Moura, J. Cavalcanti, and J. Freire, A Fast andRobust Method for Web Page Template Detection and Removal, In Proc. 15thCIKM, pages 256-267, 2006) proposed performing site-level templatedetection by mapping identical nodes and subtrees in the DOM trees oftwo different pages. They proposed performing the expensive task oftemplate detection on a small number of pages, and then removing allinstances of these templates from the entire site by a much cheaperapproach.

While these “site-level” template detection methods offer a lot ofpromise, such methods are of limited use because of the following tworeasons. First, site-level templates constitute only a small fraction ofall templates on the web. For instance, page-and session-specificnavigation aids such as “Also bought” lists, ads, etc. are not capturedby the site-level notion of templates. Second, these methods are errorprone when the number of pages analyzed from a site is statisticallyinsignificant, either because the site is small, or because a largefraction of the site is yet to be crawled. In particular, they aretotally inapplicable when pages from a new website are encountered forthe first time.

Additionally, some page-level algorithms have also been proposedrecently that may operate only on segments of a web page. For example,Kao et al. (see H.-Y. Kao, J.-M. Ho, and M.-S. Chen, WISDOM: WebIntrapage Informative Structure Mining Based on Document Object Model,TKDE, 17(5):614-627, 2005) segment a given webpage using a greedyalgorithm operating on features derived from the page. To do so, theyuse both page-level and site-level features such as the number of linksbetween pages on a web-site. Debnath et al. (see S. Debnath, P. Mitra,N. Pal, and C. L. Giles, Automatic Identification of InformativeSections of Web Pages, TKDE, 17(9):1233-1246, 2005) also propose apage-level algorithm (“L-Extractor”) that applies a classifier to DOMnodes, but only certain nodes are chosen for classification, based on apredefined set of tags. Kao et al. (see H.-Y. Kao, M.-S. Chen, S.-H.Lin, and J.-M. Ho, Entropy-based link analysis for mining webinformative structures, In Proc. 11th CIKM, pages 574-581, 2002) proposea scheme based on information entropy to focus on the links and pagesthat are most information-rich, reducing the weights of templatematerial as a by-product. Song et al. (see R. Song, H. Liu, J.-R. Wen,and W.-Y. Ma, Learning Block Importance Models for Web Pages, In Proc.13th WWW, pages 203-211, 2004) use visual layout features of the webpageto segment it into blocks which are then judged on their salience andquality. Other local algorithms based on machine learning have beenproposed to remove certain types of template material. Davison (see B.Davison, Recognizing Nepotistic Links on the Web, In AAAI-2000 Workshopon Artificial Intelligence for Web Search, pages 23-28, 2000) usesdecision tree learning to detect and remove “nepotistic” links, andKushmerick (see N. Kushmerick, Learning to Remove InternetAdvertisement, In Proc. 3rd Agents, pages 175-181, 1999.) develops abrowsing assistant that learns to automatically removes banneradvertisements from pages.

Unfortunately, only segments of a web page may be operated upon by thesealgorithms, and the segments are chosen prior to any determination ofthe templateness of those segments. As a result, these algorithms wouldnot be able to detect a segment that may be itself composed of severaltemplate and non-template nodes.

What is needed is a system and method that does not need multiple pagesfrom the same website to perform template detection and that may performtemplate detection for any subset of a web page. Such a system andmethod should be easily deployed as a drop-in module in an existing webcrawler work flow.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Briefly, the present invention may provide a system and method fordetecting a web page template. Briefly, the present invention mayprovide a system and method for detecting a web page template. In anembodiment, a web page template detector may be provided for performingpage-level template detection on a web page. The web page templatedetector may include an operably coupled web page template classifierfor identifying a web page template that represents web site informationon the web page. The web page template detector may also include anoperably coupled isotonic smoothing engine for smoothing templatenessscores assigned by the web page template classifier using generalizedisotonic regression on a tree. In general, the web page templateclassifier may be trained using automatically generated training data,and then the web page template classifier may be applied to web pages toidentify web page templates.

The present invention may detect a web page template by classifyingsegments of a web page as template structures, by assigningclassification scores to the segments of the web page classified astemplate structures, and then by smoothing the classification scoresassigned to the segments of the web page. In order to classify segmentsof a web page as template structures, the web page may be preprocessedto extract features for identifying the template structures.Additionally, logistic regression classifiers may be trained over a setof features for identifying the template structures.

The present invention may also provide a system and method for smoothingscores associated with the nodes of a hierarchy using generalizedisotonic regression. In particular, the templateness scores associatedwith DOM nodes of a web page are smoothed, and, as a result, theisotonic smoothing provides a segmentation of the web page into templateand non-template regions. The generalized isotonic regression may beapplied to scores associated with nodes of a hierarchy by building anerror data structure for storing an error value for each node of thehierarchy, computing an error function for each node of the hierarchywhich may represent the cost of the optimal smoothed score in a subtreerooted at a node, and smoothing the scores by minimizing an optimizationfunction using dynamic programming. In an embodiment, a cost functionhaving a distance function and having a penalty term representing a costof a smoothed score may be minimized.

The present invention may support many online applications. For example,template detection at the page-level may be used as a pre-processingstep to web mining applications such as duplicate detection and web pageclassification. Moreover, an off-the-shelf classifier may be used in theframework, instead of having to design one that works specifically forthe given hierarchical structure. Other advantages will become apparentfrom the following detailed description when taken in conjunction withthe drawings, in which:

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a block diagram generally representing a computer system intowhich the present invention may be incorporated;

FIG. 2 is a block diagram generally representing an exemplaryarchitecture of system components in an embodiment for detecting a webpage template, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention;

FIG. 3 is a flowchart generally representing the steps undertaken in oneembodiment for training a web template classifier using automaticallygenerated training data, in accordance with an aspect of the presentinvention;

FIG. 4 is a flowchart generally representing the steps undertaken in oneembodiment for identifying web page templates using a trained webtemplate classifier, in accordance with an aspect of the presentinvention;

FIG. 5 is a flowchart generally representing the steps undertaken in oneembodiment for classifying segments of a web page as a templatestructure, in accordance with an aspect of the present invention; and

FIG. 6 is a flowchart generally representing the steps undertaken in oneembodiment for performing generalized isotonic regression on a tree, inaccordance with an aspect of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION Exemplary Operating Environment

FIG. 1 illustrates suitable components in an exemplary embodiment of ageneral purpose computing system. The exemplary embodiment is only oneexample of suitable components and is not intended to suggest anylimitation as to the scope of use or functionality of the invention.Neither should the configuration of components be interpreted as havingany dependency or requirement relating to any one or combination ofcomponents illustrated in the exemplary embodiment of a computer system.The invention may be operational with numerous other general purpose orspecial purpose computing system environments or configurations.

The invention may be described in the general context ofcomputer-executable instructions, such as program modules, beingexecuted by a computer. Generally, program modules include routines,programs, objects, components, data structures, and so forth, whichperform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types.The invention may also be practiced in distributed computingenvironments where tasks are performed by remote processing devicesthat-are linked through a communications network. In a distributedcomputing environment, program modules may be located in local and/orremote computer storage media including memory storage devices.

With reference to FIG. 1, an exemplary system for implementing theinvention may include a general purpose computer system 100. Componentsof the computer system 100 may include, but are not limited to, a CPU orcentral processing unit 102, a system memory 104, and a system bus 120that couples various system components including the system memory 104to the processing unit 102. The system bus 120 may be any of severaltypes of bus structures including a memory bus or memory controller, aperipheral bus, and a local bus using any of a variety of busarchitectures. By way of example, and not limitation, such architecturesinclude Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, Micro ChannelArchitecture (MCA) bus, Enhanced ISA (EISA) bus, Video ElectronicsStandards Association (VESA) local bus, and Peripheral ComponentInterconnect (PCI) bus also known as Mezzanine bus.

The computer system 100 may include a variety of computer-readablemedia. Computer-readable media can be any available media that can beaccessed by the computer system 100 and includes both volatile andnonvolatile media. For example, computer-readable media may includevolatile and nonvolatile computer storage media implemented in anymethod or technology for storage of information such ascomputer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules orother data. Computer storage media includes, but is not limited to, RAM,ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digitalversatile disks (DVD) or other optical disk storage, magnetic cassettes,magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices,or any other medium which can be used to store the desired informationand which can accessed by the computer system 100. Communication mediamay include computer-readable instructions, data structures, programmodules or other data in a modulated data signal such as a carrier waveor other transport mechanism and includes any information deliverymedia. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one ormore of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encodeinformation in the signal. For instance, communication media includeswired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, andwireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.

The system memory 104 includes computer storage media in the form ofvolatile and/or nonvolatile memory such as read only memory (ROM) 106and random access memory (RAM) 110. A basic input/output system 108(BIOS), containing the basic routines that help to transfer informationbetween elements within computer system 100, such as during start-up, istypically stored in ROM 106. Additionally, RAM 110 may contain operatingsystem 112, application programs 114, other executable code 116 andprogram data 118. RAM 110 typically contains data and/or program modulesthat are immediately accessible to and/or presently being operated on byCPU 102.

The computer system 100 may also include other removable/non-removable,volatile/nonvolatile computer storage media. By way of example only,FIG. 1 illustrates a hard disk drive 122 that reads from or writes tonon-removable, nonvolatile magnetic media, and storage device 134 thatmay be an optical disk drive or a magnetic disk drive that reads from orwrites to a removable, a nonvolatile storage medium 144 such as anoptical disk or magnetic disk. Other removable/non-removable,volatile/nonvolatile computer storage media that can be used in theexemplary computer system 100 include, but are not limited to, magnetictape cassettes, flash memory cards, digital versatile disks, digitalvideo tape, solid state RAM, solid state ROM, and the like. The harddisk drive 122 and the storage device 134 may be typically connected tothe system bus 120 through an interface such as storage interface 124.

The drives and their associated computer storage media, discussed aboveand illustrated in FIG. 1, provide storage of computer-readableinstructions, executable code, data structures, program modules andother data for the computer system 100. In FIG. 1, for example, harddisk drive 122 is illustrated as storing operating system 112,application programs 114, other executable code 116 and program data118. A user may enter commands and information into the computer system100 through an input device 140 such as a keyboard and pointing device,commonly referred to as mouse, trackball or touch pad tablet, electronicdigitizer, or a microphone. Other input devices may include a joystick,game pad, satellite dish, scanner, and so forth. These and other inputdevices are often connected to CPU 102 through an input interface 130that is coupled to the system bus, but may be connected by otherinterface and bus structures, such as a parallel port, game port or auniversal serial bus (USB). A display 138 or other type of video devicemay also be connected to the system bus 120 via an interface, such as avideo interface 128. In addition, an output device 142, such as speakersor a printer, may be connected to the system bus 120 through an outputinterface 132 or the like computers.

The computer system 100 may operate in a networked environment using anetwork 136 to one or more remote computers, such as a remote computer146. The remote computer 146 may be a personal computer, a server, arouter, a network PC, a peer device or other common network node, andtypically includes many or all of the elements described above relativeto the computer system 100. The network 136 depicted in FIG. 1 mayinclude a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or othertype of network. Such networking environments are commonplace inoffices, enterprise-wide computer networks, intranets and the Internet.In a networked environment, executable code and application programs maybe stored in the remote computer. By way of example, and not limitation,FIG. 1 illustrates remote executable code 148 as residing on remotecomputer 146. It will be appreciated that the network connections shownare exemplary and other means of establishing a communications linkbetween the computers may be used.

Detecting a Web Page Template

The present invention is generally directed towards a system and methodfor detecting a web page template. In general, a web template classifiermay be trained using automatically generated training data, and then theweb template classifier may be applied to web pages to identify web pagetemplates. Segments of a web page may be classified as a templatestructure, and templateness scores assigned to segments of the web pageas a result of classification may then be smoothed using an isotonicsmoothing algorithm. As used herein, a web page template meansinformation about a web page or web site that may be distinguished frommain content published on the web page. For example, a web page templatemay represent site navigation links, sidebars, copyright notices, andtimestamps.

As will be seen, the isotonic smoothing algorithm provides asegmentation of the web page into template and non-template regions.Moreover, template detection at the page-level may be used as apre-processing step to web mining applications such as duplicatedetection and web page classification. As will be understood, thevarious block diagrams, flow charts and scenarios described herein areonly examples, and there are many other scenarios to which the presentinvention will apply.

Turning to FIG. 2 of the drawings, there is shown a block diagramgenerally representing an exemplary architecture of system componentsfor detecting a web page template. Those skilled in the art willappreciate that the functionality implemented within the blocksillustrated in the diagram may be implemented as separate components orthe functionality of several or all of the blocks may be implementedwithin a single component. For example, the functionality for theisotonic smoothing engine 208 may be included in the same component asthe web page template classifier 206. Or the functionality of theisotonic smoothing engine 208 may be implemented as a separate componentfrom the web page template detector 204.

In various embodiments, a computer 202, such as computer system 100 ofFIG. 1, may include a web page template detector 204 operably coupled tostorage 210. In general, the web page template detector 204 may be anytype of executable software code such as a kernel component, anapplication program, a linked library, an object with methods, and soforth. The storage 210 may be any type of computer-readable media andmay store web pages 212, or links to web pages such as URLs. Each of theweb pages 212 may be represented by a DOM tree 214 that may include oneor more DOM nodes 216 that may each have a site information score 218representing the likelihood that the DOM node has information about theweb site that may be distinguished from content published on thecorresponding web page.

The web page template detector 204 may provide services for detecting aweb page template that may include web site information on a web page. Aweb page may be any information that may be addressable by a URL,including a document, an image, audio, and so forth. The web pagedetector 204 may include a web page template classifier 206 foridentifying a web page template that represents web site information ofa web page 212, and an isotonic smoothing engine 208 for smoothing siteinformation scores 218 associated with DOM nodes of the web page 212.Each of these modules may also be any type of executable software codesuch as a kernel component, an application program, a linked library, anobject with methods, or other type of executable software code.

A web page may be an HTML document represented by a DOM tree where eachnode in the DOM tree corresponds to an HTML fragment. Each DOM node maybe identified with the HTML fragment that it may represent. Let T be therooted DOM tree corresponding to the HTML document. Accordingly, thetree T may represent an embodiment of a web page. Consider templ(T) todenote the set of nodes in T that are web page templates. Consider i∈Tto denote that node i belongs to tree T, parent(i) to denote the parentof i in T, child(i) to denote the set of children of i in T, and root(T)to denote the root of T.

Furthermore, consider H to denote the set of possible DOM nodes. In thepage-level template detection problem, we seek a boolean functionτ:H→{0,1} such that for all i∈templ(T), τ(i)=1, and for all i∉ templ(T),τ(i)=0. In a relaxed version of the problem, we seek a function {tildeover (τ)}:H→[0,1] where if i∈templ(T) and j∉templ(T), then {tilde over(τ)}(i)>{tilde over (τ)}(j); using an appropriate threshold, we canround {tilde over (τ)} to make it boolean.

A first-cut approach to page-level template detection would be toextract sufficiently rich features from the DOM nodes (in the context ofa page) and train a classifier x:H→[0,1] to score the “templateness” ofeach node in a given page. While this appears plausible, it has severalissues when scrutinized closely. The first set of issues revolve aroundthe construction of the training data for the classifier. For theclassifier to learn the notion of “templateness” of DOM nodes on the webin general, it must be trained comprehensively over all forms oftemplates that it is likely to encounter. The heterogeneity and scale ofthe web imply that a huge corpus of accurate and diverse training datawill be required. These requirements present a daunting task thatdemands tremendous human effort. Secondly, this approach toclassification ignores the global property of templateness monotonicityin the DOM tree, crisply stated as follows: a node in the tree is atemplate if and only if all its children are templates. In other words,the function τ(·) is monotone on the tree. As is apparent, by working oneach node of T in isolation, a naive classifier may miss this intuitiverelationship among templateness of nodes in the tree.

A framework is presented to allow template detection for a web page. Ingeneral, a web template classifier may be trained using theautomatically generated training data, and then the web templateclassifier may be applied to web pages for template detection. FIG. 3presents a flowchart generally representing the steps undertaken in oneembodiment for training a web template classifier using automaticallygenerated training data. At step 302, a collection of web pages may bereceived. In an embodiment, the collection of web pages may representweb pages from several web sites. Training data may then be generated atstep 304 using the collection of web pages received.

The step of automatic generation of training data may be accomplished inan embodiment using site-level template detection as described by D.Gibson, K. Punera, and A. Tomkins, The Volume and Evolution of Web PageTemplates, In Proc. 14th WWW (Special Interest Tracks and Posters),pages 830-839, 2005. Note that even though site-level template detectionis less feasible as a web-scale template detection mechanism, it maystill be used to generate training data to train a web page templateclassifier. The basic intuition behind the site-level template detectionapproach is the following. One of the common properties of templates isthat they occur repeatedly across many pages on a single site.Therefore, if a DOM node occurs many times on different pages from asingle site, then it lends credible evidence that this DOM node perhapscorresponds to a template.

For example, a generic algorithm that may be called SiteLevel (θ) may beused in various embodiments which may operate on a site by site basis.For each site, SiteLevel (θ) may obtain a set Γ of random pages from thesite. Then, for each page T∈Γ and for every DOM node i∈T, SiteLevel (θ)may compute h(i), where h(·) may be a random hash function. Consider I⁺⊂U_(T∈Γ)T to be the set of DOM nodes that may occur on at least θfraction of pages in Γ. Note that this set of DOM nodes can beidentified efficiently using hashes. SiteLevel (θ) may return I⁺ as theset of DOM nodes deemed templates.

Once training data may be generated, a classifier may be trained toidentify a template for a web page at step 306. For example, a set ofDOM nodes I⁺ identified by SiteLevel (θ) may be used as training datafor a classifier. Features of DOM nodes in I⁺ may be identified in thecontext of the web pages that may be indicative that a DOM node may be atemplate. A classifier x:H→[0,1] may then be trained in an embodimentusing these features of the DOM nodes, treating those in I⁺ as positiveexamples. The output of the classifier may be a templateness score (orsite information score) for a given DOM node in a tree. Advantageously,a classifier may be able to distill features from site-level templatesthat can be generalized to other templates on the web. This may helpidentify templates that don't manifest themselves by repeatedlyoccurring across multiple pages on a web site. This may includetemplates that a pure site-level template detection approach cannotdiscover by itself.

Once the web page template classifier may be trained to detect web pagetemplates, the web page template classifier may be applied to web pagesto identify web page templates. FIG. 4 presents a flowchart generallyrepresenting the steps undertaken in one embodiment for identifying webpage templates using a trained web template classifier. At step 402, aweb page may be received and segments of the web page may be classifiedas a template structure at step 404. At step 406, templateness scoresassigned to segments of the web page as a result of classification maybe smoothed using isotonic regression.

Although the classifier may be used to assign a templateness score x( )to each DOM node in the given page T, such a templateness scoresassigned by the classifier to each DOM node in isolation of other DOMnodes may not satisfy the property of templateness monotonicity that anode is a template if and only if all its children are templates. On theother hand, assuming the classifier has reasonable accuracy, the scoresit assigns may make sense for most, if not for all, of the nodes.

In order to reconcile the score assigned by the classifier with themonotonicity property of the templates, consider a naturalgeneralization of the monotonicity property for the case of real valuedtemplateness scores. Assume y(i) may denote the templateness score of anode i in the tree. Then, y(·) may satisfy generalized templatenessmonotonicity if for every internal node i, with children j₁, . . . ,j_(l), y(i)=min{y(j₁), . . . , y(j_(l))}, i.e., the templateness of aninternal node is the equal to the least of its children's templatenessscores.

Note that generalized monotonicity ensures, first, that the templatenessscore of a node is at least the templateness score of its parent, andsecond, that the templateness score of the parent equals thetemplateness score of all its children, when the children all have sametemplateness score. In addition, the templateness score y( ) may berequired to be close to the x( ) scores assigned by the classifier.Together, generalized monotonicity with this closeness requirement givesrise to the problem of generalized isotonic regression on trees.Smoothing the output of the classifier on individual nodes of the treemay be represented as the following generalized isotonic regressionproblem for a distance function d(·,·): given a tree T and a functionx:T→+[0,1], find a function y:T→[0,1] such that y(·) and d(x,y) may beminimized and for every internal node i, with children j₁, . . . ,j_(l), y(i)≦min{y(j₁), . . . , y(j_(l))}, i.e., the templateness of aninternal node is at most the least of its children's templatenessscores. By applying isotonic smoothing-to templateness scores, asectioning of a web page into segments may be obtained. This may beuseful in many applications, including finding web pages with duplicatecontent and web page classification.

FIG. 5 presents a flowchart generally representing the steps undertakenin one embodiment for classifying segments of a web page as a templatestructure. At step 502, features may be defined on a DOM node of a webpage, and then features of a DOM node of a web page may be extracted atstep 504. In an embodiment, a web page may be preprocessed and parsed sothat features can be extracted for its DOM nodes. The preprocessing stepmay involve cleaning the HTML code, for instance by using Hypar2,annotating the DOM nodes with position and area information, for exampleby using Mozilla3, and parsing the HTML code to obtain a DOM treestructure. The text in the HTML page may also be processed to removestop words.

The training data employed for learning corresponds to site-leveltemplates. However, the classifier should generalize the site-leveldefinition of the template in the training data to a global definitionof a template. This may make the process of feature extraction verycritical. From each DOM node, features may be extracted that may beindicative of whether or not that DOM node may be a template. Forexample, intuitively, if the text within a DOM node shares a lot ofwords with the title of the web page, then perhaps it may not be atemplate node. Similarly, the distance of a DOM node from the center forthe page may indicate its importance to the main purpose of the page,and hence its templateness.

In a similar fashion, several other features may be constructed from theposition and area annotations of DOM nodes as well as from the text,links, and anchortext they may contain. Some of the most discriminativefeatures include: closeness to the margins of the webpage, number oflinks per word, fraction of text within anchors, the size of theanchors, fraction of links that are intra-site, and the ratio of visiblecharacters to HTML content.

At step 506, a templateness score may then be assigned to DOM nodes ofthe web page for extracted features of the DOM node. To do so, Logisticregression classifiers (see T. Mitchell, Machine Learning, McGraw Hill,1997) may be trained over the set of features described above. Apartfrom performing very well, these classifiers may have the additionalbenefit that their classification output can be interpreted as theprobability of belonging to the predicted class. In exploratoryexperiments, distributions of feature values may be observed to varyheavily depending on the area of the DOM node, perhaps because templateand non-template nodes have very different characteristics at differentlevels of the DOM trees. Because these levels can be approximated by thearea of the node, four logistic regression models may be trained in anembodiment for DOM nodes of different sizes. Given a web page, theappropriate logistic model may be applied to each node of the DOM tree,and the output probabilities may be smoothed using isotonic regression.

There are many advantages of the framework presented for detecting webpage templates. Importantly, the overall framework is simple andmodular. Moreover, an off-the-shelf classifier may be used in theframework, instead of having to design one that works specifically forthe given DOM tree structure.

Isotonic Smoothing

In order to reconcile the score assigned by the classifier with themonotonicity property of the templates, a generalized isotonicregression on trees is formulated and solved for smoothing templatenessscores assigned to segments of a web page. Recall that a DOM tree witheach node labeled by a score assigned by the classifier may be given asinput and the purpose of isotonic regression on trees is to smooth thetemplateness scores assigned so that the scores satisfy the monotonicityconstraints, while remaining as faithful as possible to the originalclassifier scores. Consider x(i) be the classifier score for each nodei∈T and consider y(i) be the smoothed score we wish to obtain.

The generalized monotonicity property may be modified in an embodimentin two ways. First, the monotonicity property may be relaxed to onlyensure that the templateness score of a node is at most the least of itschildren's scores, instead of equal to it. This relaxation is derivedfrom the current domain in which the cost of misclassifying anon-template as a template may be much higher than vice versa. Hence, ifaccording to the classifier an internal node's template score is muchlower than that of all of its children, then that should be respected.Second, a regularization may be introduced that penalizes if, for a nodei, the templateness score y(i) is different from those of its childrenj(j₁), . . . , y(j_(k)). Clearly, if y(j₁)= . . . =y(j_(k)), then thisregularization will try to ensure that y(i)=y(j₁).

Thus, for every internal node i with children j₁, . . . , j_(l),y(i)≦min{y(j₁), . . . , y(j_(l))}. For purposes of regularization, thenotion of a compressed score may be developed that embodies sectioningof the DOM tree into subtrees. A compressed score is a functionŷ:T→[0,1]∪{⊥} with the following properties: ŷ(root(T))≠⊥, and if i isan ancestor of j and ŷ(i)≠⊥≠ŷ(j), then ŷ(i)<ŷ(j). Also consider the size|ŷ| of the compressed score to denote the number of places where ŷ isdefined:ŷ=|{i|i∈T,y(i)≠⊥}.

Furthermore, for all i∈T such that ŷ(i)=⊥, consider anc(i) be theclosest ancestor of i such that ŷ(anc(i))≠⊥. Note that such an ancestormust always exists since ŷ(root(T))≠⊥. Consider that ŷ may beinterpolated to a unique y as follows:

${y(i)} = \left\{ \begin{matrix}{\hat{y}\left( {{anc}(i)} \right)} & {{{if}\mspace{14mu}\hat{y}} = \bot} \\{\hat{y}(i)} & {{otherwise}.}\end{matrix} \right.$

It is clear that if ŷ satisfies ŷ(root(T))≠⊥ and ŷ(i)<ŷ(j), if i is anancestor of j and ŷ(i)≠⊥≠ŷ(j), then the corresponding interpolated ysatisfies the property of templateness monotonicity that a node is atemplate if and only if all its children are templates. Also, given a ysatisfying the property of templateness monotonicity, it is easy toconstruct the unique ŷ. Accordingly, from now on, the smoothed score yand its compressed counterpart ŷ may be used herein interchangeably.

Finally, the cost of a smoothed score y with respect to x may be definedas c(y)=γ·|ŷ|+d(x,y), where γ is a penalty term that captures the costof each new smoothed score and d(·,·) is some distance function. It isalso possible to have a node-specific penalty term γ_(i) for node i; forsimplicity of exposition, the algorithm may be stated in terms of anode-independent term γ. This cost function and the tree structure leadto a regularized version of the isotonic regression problem, namely aregularized tree isotonic regression as follows: given a tree T andx:T→[0,1], find y:T→[0,1] that satisfies y(i)≦min{y(j₁), . . . ,y(j_(l))} for every internal node i with children j₁, . . . , j_(l) andminimizes c(y)=γ·|ŷ|+d(x,y). In an embodiment, d(·,·) may be consideredto be the L₁ norm since it is robust against outliers.

Before presenting an embodiment of an algorithm for a regularized treeisotonic regression, a key property of the L₁ distance measure may bediscussed that aids in designing an efficient algorithm for thisproblem. It may be shown that the optimal smoothed scores in y can onlycome from the classifier scores in x. There exists an optimal solution,ŷ, where, for all i∈T, if ŷ(i)≠⊥, then there is a j∈T such thatŷ(i)=x(j).

Although isotonic regression has been considered before in statisticsand computer science contexts without imposition of a hierarchicalorder, here an isotonic regression is considered for a hierarchy wherethe y_(i)'s may have a given partial order, such as a hierarchical orderimposed by a tree. A dynamic program may be built using the above resultto obtain an algorithm for the regularized tree isotonic regressionproblem.

FIG. 6 presents a flowchart generally representing the steps undertakenin one embodiment for performing generalized isotonic regression on atree. At step 602, a hierarchy of scores may be received. In anembodiment, the scores may be organized in a tree such as templatenessscores defined on DOM nodes of a web page. A data structure may be builtat step 604 that may represent an error function for each node of thetree. In an embodiment, the algorithm BuildError may build up an indexfunction val(i,j) and an error function err(i,j) for each node i∈T. Thevalue err(i,j) represents the cost of the optimal smoothed scores in thesubtree rooted at i if its parent node has the smoothed scorey(parent(i))=x(j). In this situation, the index val(i,j) is such thatthe optimal smoothed score for node i is given by y(i)=x(val(i,j)).

If val(i,j) is the same as j, i.e, the optimal value for i and parent(i)are the same x(j), then the only cost is the L₁ distance between x(i)and x(val(i,j)), otherwise there is an additional γ cost as well. Thealgorithm may computes this error function by first computing errors asif the additional γ cost must always be added; this intermediate resultis stored in the err′ array, where err′(j) is the error if the nodeunder consideration has the smoothed score y(i)=x(j). Then, it choosesbetween (a) continuing with the parent's value and subtracting γ fromthe corresponding cost err′, or (b) creating a new section with a newvalue and paying in full the corresponding cost in err′.

The pseudocode for the Algorithm BuildError is presented in anembodiment as follows:

Algorithm BuildError (i,x,γ) if (i is a leaf) then 1. for j ∈ T /* allvalues node i can take */ if (x(i) − x(j) > γ) then err(i,j) = γ;val(i,j) = i else err(i,j) = |x(i) − x(j)|; val(i,j) = j else 2. forchild u of node i BuildError(u, x, γ) 3. for j ∈ T /* all values node ican take */${{err}^{\prime}(j)} = {{{{x(i)} - {x(j)}}} + {\sum\limits_{k \in {{child}{(i)}}}{{err}\left( {k,j} \right)}} + \gamma}$4. for j ∈ T /*all values node parent(i) can take */ val* =argmin_(k∈T, x(k)>x(j)) err′(k) err* = err′(val*) if (err′(j) − γ · ≧err* or i = root(T)) then err(i,j) = err*; val(i,j) = val* else err(i,j)= err′(j) − γ; val(i,j) = j

Returning to FIG. 6, the scores may be smoothed by minimizing anoptimization function using dynamic programming at step 606. Once theerror functions have been computed, the optimal smoothed scores may beobtained in an embodiment using Algorithm IsotoneSmooth, which startswith the best index p(root(T)) at the root, and progressively finds thebest index p(·) for nodes lower down in the tree.

The pseudocode for the Algorithm IsotoneSmooth is presented in anembodiment as follows:

Algorithm IsotoheSmooth (err, val)

val*=arg min_(i∈T) err_(root(T)) (X(i))

p(root(T))=val*; y(root(T))=x(val*)

for i in a breadth-first search order of T

p(i)=val(i,p(parent(i))); y(i)=x(p_(i))

Thus the algorithm IsotoneSmooth solves the regularized tree isotonicregression problem. To do so, the algorithm may compute from the bottomup the optimal smoothed scores for each subtree, i.e., the err(·,·)arrays, while maintaining the property of templateness monotonicity forpossible smoothed score of the parent. Because there exists an optimalsolution, ŷ, where, for all i∈T, if ŷ(i)≠⊥, then there is a j∈T suchthat ŷ(i)=x(j), the parent can take only finitely many smoothed scoresin the optimal solution, and because for all nodes j in the subtree ofi, y(j)=z(j), combining the optimal smoothed scores for subtrees yieldsthe optimal smoothed scores for the entire tree.

As can be seen from the foregoing detailed description, the presentinvention provides an improved system and method for detecting a webpage template. A framework is provided to automatically build apage-level templateness classifier. Training data may be generated byapplying a site-level template detection method on several randomlyselected sites. Next, appropriate features for these site-leveltemplates may be defined and extracted. Finally, this automaticallygenerated data may be used to train a classifier that can assign atemplateness score to nodes in a DOM tree. Advantageously, the web pagetemplate classifier generalizes beyond its site-level training data andcan also discover templates that manifest only at the page-level.

Moreover, the framework presented formulates a monotone property thatrelates templateness scores across nodes of the DOM tree so that a nodein the DOM tree is a template if and only if all its children aretemplates. A regularized isotonic regression on a tree may be solvedusing an efficient algorithm to find smoothed scores that are not farfrom the classifier scores assigned at the nodes of a tree, but satisfya relaxed monotonicity property. Advantageously, the framework alsoprovides a sectioning of a web page into segments which may be useful inmany applications including applications for finding web pages withduplicate content and applications for web page classification. As aresult, the system and method provide significant advantages andbenefits needed in contemporary computing and in online applications.

While the invention is susceptible to various modifications andalternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof areshown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It shouldbe understood, however, that there is no intention to limit theinvention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, theintention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, andequivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.

1. A computer system for smoothing scores, comprising: a plurality ofscores associated with nodes of a hierarchy; an isotonic smoothingengine for smoothing the plurality of scores associated with the nodesof the hierarchy using generalized isotonic regression; and a storageoperably coupled to the isotonic smoothing engine for storing theplurality of scores associated with the nodes of the hierarchy, whereinthe storage operably coupled to the isotonic smoothing engine forstoring the plurality of scores associated with the nodes of thehierarchy comprises a storage operably coupled to the isotonic smoothingengine for storing a plurality of templateness scores associated withDOM nodes of a web page.
 2. A computer system for smoothing scores,comprising: a plurality of scores associated with nodes of a hierarchy;an isotonic smoothing engine for smoothing the plurality of scoresassociated with the nodes of the hierarchy using generalized isotonicregression; and a storage operably coupled to the isotonic smoothingengine for storing the plurality of scores associated with the nodes ofthe hierarchy, wherein the isotonic smoothing engine for smoothing theplurality of scores associated with the nodes of the hierarchy usinggeneralized isotonic regression comprises an isotonic smoothing enginefor smoothing a plurality of templateness scores associated with nodesof a web page using generalized isotonic regression on a tree.
 3. Anon-transitory computer-readable medium comprising executableinstructions, operable when executed by one or more processors to:maintain a plurality of scores associated with nodes of a hierarchy;smooth the plurality of scores associated with the nodes of thehierarchy using generalized isotonic regression; and store the pluralityof scores associated with the nodes of the hierarchy, wherein storingthe plurality of scores associated with the nodes of the hierarchycomprises storing a plurality of templateness scores associated with DOMnodes of a web page.